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Story:Silent Running
I'm writing this to keep myself from going insane. Right now, everything is off, except for a battery pen light which I'm using so that I can see what I'm writing. It's very quaint to use pen and paper. No tricorders, no computers, nothing that draws power. We've turned off everything. No instruments. No lights. No life support. That's right. Even the oxygen generators are off, and I'm watching Myra in the corner staring at the CO2 sensor. No electricity. No power. Just a vial of chemicals that is green now, but will gradually turn yellow, and then red as we run out of oxygen. I'm glad she is looking at the oxygen sensor, because I'm afraid to look at her face to see what she is thinking. It's probably a very, very dirty look. I'm starting to find it difficult to breathe but since the sensor is still reading green, it's just my nerves. Right now, we are in a container module orbiting around Gamma Ceti IV, right inside the Romulan Neutral Zone. Outside there is a Romulan patrol ship or at least there was three hour ago. It would be nice to know if it is still out there, but we turn on the mains, and the patrol ship is still out there, then we are dead. that is of course assuming that we are lucky and the ship just wants some target practice. If we unlucky, then we get boarded, tractored to the nearest penal colony, and we spending the rest of our lives working the dilithium mines. Myra just held made the sign for two. We have four hours before we run out of oxygen, and yes, she does have a dirty look on her face. Oops. She just made another hand signal, and this one is pretty rude. I suppose I deserve it. So we are just beyond the neutral zone, in a shipping crate with no weapons, almost no propulsion, and no way out except to hit the switch marked "vent." So imaginary reader, you may ask how we got here. Well it has to do with the book right in front of me......... The Blood Quest. The famous semi-legendary Andorian poem about a knight boldly going where no Andorian male had gone before to rescue his fair maiden from the clutches of the evil Misasmian slavers. How much of that is real, how much is legendary is still a mystery, but it caught my imagination so that when I grew up, I was going to be an astro-archeologist and find the legendary city of the spirits. So after enlisting in Starfleet for five years as a sensor engineer, I did my graduate work in Cygnus III, where I met my associate Myra, a most brilliant xeno-linguist. And so we struck up a friendship. Me your stereotypical naive lad from Kansas, and her, well... I'm not sure what she is. I think she is some Orion-Romulan-Vulcan] hybrid. I've never seen her family, but all I've seen are pictures of various people, who I've assumed are relative. Except that she is green and they are not. Whenever the topic comes up, she just smiles and describes herself as a genetic experiment gone horribly right. The only thing I'm really certain of is that Myra is a she, or something that can resemble a she so that.... Ummmm.... Myra is giving me a dirty look again, and making rude hand gestures. You know, sometimes she gives me dirty looks and makes rude hand gestures, because she wants.... Ummm... Me to do things, but right now I think she is just making rude hand gestures and giving me dirty looks because she is pissed off. I think she is telepathic, but anyway...... The one thing that I know about her is that she is some short of trust fund baby. The ones that you find in linguist schools all over the place. Having a friend with seemingly infinite amounts of cash is really useful when you are a poor, starving astro-archaeologist. So she and I bought ourselves a university position and then created the Lair. It's a shipping container with all sorts of fun pieces of equipment for planetary scanning. It's mostly Starfleet surplus equipment with a lot of tweaks here and there. About six months ago, we were on a dig on the fifth moon of Ghazar III, and she remarked that the patterns resembled the locations described in Book IV of the Blood Quest. It was a causal remark, but it got me thinking that if that's the case, we could use the clues in the book to figure out the location of the Gateway to Heaven in book V. So I made a few notes and did some calculations, and figured out the Blue Planet was some place that was completely devoid of stars. About a week later, she was looking over the notes in my desk (and she does this from time to time for reasons that I never understood), and she looked at my calculations and then wrote on a note "you are not completely incompetent, but your calculations are wrong, here is where the Blue Planet is." And when I got the note I was overjoyed, because I found the legendary Gateway to Heaven, until we both looked in the charts, and it turned out that the legendary Blue Planet was located precisely on the wrong side of the Neutral Zone in Romulan space. And then she looked at me, and said, I guess we'll never know. "Why?" I replied. "Well it's not as if *YOU* are going to find some smuggler to set you to Gamma Ceti IV to see if its true." I think if she had phrased things just a little differently, we wouldn't be locked up in a shipping crate about to be vaporized by a Romulan plasma beam. If she had said "Well, it's not as if *WE* are going to find some smuggler to send *us* to Gamma Ceti IV to see" then I don't think we'd be in this predicament. But the way she phrased it, I was pretty insulted. So a year past, and one day I just stuck a note to her computer. "Borrowed the Lair. Off to Shistak!!!! See you later." Ahh. Shistak. The legendary smuggling port between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Well. That's what the tour book I got said. You'd expect the main port or smuggling between the Federation and Romulan Star Empire to be full of seedy bars and alien beings of weird provenance, but what I found were lots of bars that were trying to look seedy and dangerous, but not quite succeeding. I suppose if you want to find a bar that is really seedy and dangerous, it's probably not a good idea to get your directions from a tour book lists seedy and dangerous bars next to directions to amusement parks for the kids. The problem is that there is money in Shistak. Lots of money. Lots of money that is being made from trade that officially doesn't exist, once you have people with money, you end up with lots of four-star hotels and fancy restaurants. So I walk into a bar, I talk to the bartender, and after ordering a drink, I tell him that I want transport across the Neutral Zone. He looks in one direction. Looks at the other. Then from underneath the bar he pulls out this giant book marked "Transportation Services" opens it up and hands it to me. I later found a newsstand with copies of that book in the hotel lobby. That evening at the hotel I get a knock on my door. "Room service!" "I didn't order anything." "Open this damn door, before I punch a hole in it." It was my favorite green skinned female-impersonated space mutant. "Myra?" "Ten second!!!... Nine... Eight...." "Okay." I open the door and there she is, in a black sequence evening dress. She starts pointing at me and shaking her finger. "What nerve you have of running off half the Federation ---- "So what can we do?" "SLEEP!!!!" "You sure??" "Look, do you want me to grow male genitalia and then turn into a spider like creature that will bite your head off and suck out your blood" "You're joking right?" "How much do you really know about my biology...." I look at her..... "I need my beauty sleep!!!" "I got an idea, let's get some sleep!!!" "Thank you!!!!" The next day Myra and I went off to a smuggler's office. I'd never been to a smuggler's office, and it was on the twelve floor of a skyscraper, and was tastefully decorated with paintings of Earth Dutch landscapes, and snapshots of the smugglers work volunteering in local kindergartens and soup kitchens. I started off by saying "we need transport?" OK our standard package for shipping a container to the Romulan port of Envidis is 25,000 credits to us, 5,000 credits to bribe the Romulan border agents, and then 15,000 in licensing fees to the local Federation agency. You won't be able to find a better price elsewhere because the Romulan economy is collapsing, they need these shipments, and so the bribes we have to pay the border agents are going down, so we are passing the savings to you. "We need something different. We're we have a crewed container that needs to be placed in orbit around Gamma Ceti IV. We'll be there for a few days, and then we need retrieval." "Well that's unusual. Hmmm... We normally don't want to know wants in the cargo containers, since it doesn't matter if you are shipping bootleg DVD's or food and medicine, but we need to price for risk...." "We think Gamma Ceti IV may be the Blue Planet in the tales of the Bloodquest." "Yeah.. And I'm the queen of Orion." "OK, whatever you are really doing, it's totally insane. 200,000 credits. Only condition is that we do a scan to make sure that there are no weapons." "Okay, whatever crazy thing you are doing, it's your own business. I figure you are Federation Intelligence doing a geological survey, but you guys look too competent so I don't know what you are doing. But please to come up with a better cover story. Looking for the Blue Planet sheessh. As a matter of fact...." "Long day, lost my train of thought." ---- "I don't think this is the right planet." "What do you mean you don't think it's the right planet, we haven't set up our instruments, and there no way we can ...." "We are looking for the Blue Planet right?" "Yeah." "That planet is Orange." "Ummmm.... Well maybe isn't some linguistic thing in which orange and blue are the same co...." "Look, I'm an astro-linguist, and I can say that in no known language are the colors blue and orange the same." "What about planetary evolution?" Myra shakes her head... "Different visual systems???" She shakes her head.... "Ummm.... Errr...." I sigh. "Look, lets take some geology measurements, maybe get some paper out of it." ---- "Let me tell you what our situation is. There is a Romulan patrol ship that is locked onto us. Now maybe the captain in charge of it is a nice guy that is just going to beam us aboard his ship, take a bribe, and send us back to Federation space. Or maybe he is a sadistic bastard that likes shooting border crossers or sending them to the dilithium mines to get back at the bullies at school. I don't know, and I don't want to find out. So we pretend we are a bit of space debris, and maybe he'll leave us alone, and if he does want target practice at least it's going to end quickly." "Are we really in this much trouble or are you trying to just trying to teach me a lesson? Because I'm really scared." "We are in the middle of nowhere. He has a plasma torpedo, and we have nothing. If he decides to use it or to send us to the mines, no one is ever going to know what ever happened to us." I think I was about to cry. Myra sighed. "Here is a pad of paper and a pen. Just draw something for the next several hours, and whatever happens will happen."